Well I thought it was about time that I use this blog for what I originally created for. I created it to talk about my experiences as a developer so I’m going to share my latest jump I’ve made into the land of actionscript 3. Just as a warning this post doesn’t really have any helpful tips, it’s more just me venting some thoughts about my personal experience with the new actionscript.

First off you must understand that got started in this business as a designer. I’ve always had a passion for design and I only really got into programing as a way to enhance my designs and make them come alive. So I started learning programing in actionscript 1. Now if you ask “real” programmers they will tell you how it was barely a real programing language. It was extremely simple and let you get away with a lot. So “real” programmers didn’t like it but as a designer I loved it. It made me feel smart and say “Hey look at me, I’m a programmer now too!”. Then AS2 came out and I was really scared. It looked more complicated and used a lot of terminology I’d never heard before. Not only that but they forced you to write all the code by hand (the old version sort of walked you through it). But eventually I gave in and started learning it. It wasn’t so bad and before too long I was coding just about anything I needed and life was good.

Well once again they’ve come out with a new version of actionscript and this one is eating my lunch. It seems almost completely different from old versions of actionscript. Now here is why I prefaced this earlier by saying “I’m a designer”. All the programmers see AS3 and are leaping for joy because it’s finally a “real” programming language. And they all get together and talk about how much they love the fact that it’s now more like all the other awesome programming languages they know. But for people who don’t really know many other languages besides actionscript, the step up is more like a high jump.

And yes, I’ll be the first to admit that I know AS3 is way better then AS2. It’s a lot faster and we’ll be able to do things we never could before. The biggest challenge for me and others like me is not so much a change in verbage or terminology, it’s the complete change you have to make in your way of thinking. I have ways of doing things that I guessed were probably sloppy because I’m self taught, but it got the job done and I could do it pretty quickly. I never really got into any object oriented programming. I’d heard it was a better way of doing things but I could never really see why. Well now I don’t have a choice because AS3 is forcing me to do it (for the better I know).

I create a lot of applications in flash that make use of several different swfs that get loaded in and all needed to work together as one big happy family. This was a breeze with AS2 because I would just have one master file that would store a bunch of global master functions and variables and all the other swfs could just access them from where ever they were. That’s why I didn’t understand why I would need to make a class. If I wanted a function that could be used anywhere I would just make it global. Problem solved.

Not anymore. The new actionscript requires everything to be in classes and there aren’t any globals. So what does that mean for all you people who think like me? It means that every swf I create has to be almost completely self contained. Before all my movieclips and things wouldn’t work by themselves because they needed so many external variables and functions. But I built them for the specific purpose of working together so the need for them to be self contained just wasn’t there. Some might say this is sloppy but it makes sense to me. Making them all work by themselves just seemed like overkill. I mean if I was making some component that I knew I would be using in other places it would make sense but if I was making a movieclip for one specific purpose it didn’t.

I’ve been using AS3 for about a month now and I can say that I do see how creating a class for lots of things can help you speed up development in the long run. For instance if I have a lot of things that are similar like a list for example, I can create a base class for this that all the other lists can be made from. But now where I’m hitting a wall is once again I have an application that I’m building that has to have several parts that all need to work together. One needs to depend on variables from another and so on. But since everything has to be self contained or flash throws up a ton of errors, I’m having a hard time knowing how to structure everything. I think the biggest hurdle with OOP is knowing how to organize everything so it can relate to everything else and there just aren’t any tutorials out there for this sort of thing. I guess you either just know it or you don’t, and right now I’m the latter. I promise if I ever get this down I’ll be the first to write one up.

This probably didn’t help anyone but it’s a starting place for me. I’m learning but right now if feels like a slow process. I’ll be on a roll only to find out what I’m doing isn’t really working. I know AS3 is supposed to streamline everything but why do I feel like I have to write twice as much code to accomplish the same things I used to do in AS2.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 2:09 am and is filed under AS3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.